


Dreaming a Disaster

by neuxue



Series: Paradise Entropic [1]
Category: Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan
Genre: Gen, can only mean good things right?, dreamer Elan, have you ever heard a man scream his soul away?, plus the end of an age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-29 04:50:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11433504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neuxue/pseuds/neuxue
Summary: To dream a future of fire and calamity, in a world that had forgotten the word for war. Such is the Betrayer's burden.





	Dreaming a Disaster

**Author's Note:**

> aka that fic I wrote accidentally as part of a conversation with @Tedronai about the possibility of Elan as a Dreamer.

Always the dreams ended the same way, night after night. Something unseen shattering, exploding out into pure white shards that hung glittering, suspended motionless against the dark nothingness of the space between dreams, for an instant that seemed an age, before the darkness began roiling and expanding, and it was not the space between dreams at all, and it swallowed those gleaming white splinters and he awoke with a gasp, and a growing feeling of despair, a despair that felt like the darkness he could see but never describe. Night after night after night.

And night after night before that splintering, before the roiling sea of enveloping darkness, Elan Morin Tedronai dreamed disaster.

He dreamed an arena, or was it a field? Far more crowded than he had ever seen before, and the patterns of the sport were strange. It was sport, that tame sport they called swords. But why was there so much blood? Why did the fallen not rise?

He dreamed the Singing, dreamed the great circles of Aiel, their voices raised in harmonies. But there were flames flickering around the edges of the dream, and he had heard them sing a hundred times before, and never once had it sounded so much like screams.

He dreamed Mierin laughing, but it was a strange laughter, and black tendrils of smoke twined themselves up the skirt of her pure white dress. The silver in her hair glowed in strangely flickering light, and light fell around her like glimmering rain.

He dreamed a light like liquid steel, a light so bright that all before it vanished, leaving nothing behind but glittering streams of dust and silence. That dream drove him to the depths of the archives, to discoveries filed away as useless and impractical. Discoveries like this ‘balefire’.

He dreamed a dark tunnel, walls that twisted and stabbed out in all defiance of ordinary stone. He dreamed a lake of fire, and a circle of shadowy figures, their faces half-hidden but frozen in expressions that may have been ecstasy or may have been pain, as a voice far more than a voice rang out in wordless laughter.

He dreamed a sound to make souls weep.  _“Have you ever heard a man scream his soul away?”_   _He asks a young shepherd, in another age_. He first heard that sound before he could begin to understand, in a dream of scorched corridors hung with ruined tapestries and echoing with a cry that raked at his mind. He knew that voice.

He dreamed Lews Therin, kneeling with his head bowed over what looked like sunlight in his arms. And then Lews threw back his head and screamed, and a single name echoed into waking. That was the first dream he kept from Lews Therin. He had told him of the others, as much as he could find the words to explain. And every time, Lews smiled and thanked him with his confident laugh and an amused shake of his head. He could not tell Lews, not this time, not without explanation. He told Barid instead, and the next time Barid looked at Lews, it was with eyes cold as steel.

He dreamed, again, a ruined corridor full of lightning and terror. A scream in his ears, and in his mind the strange certainty of dreams that every second brought him closer to…his mind slid away from the answer. He understood death, of course, but this was…it slipped again, and another heartbeat passed, and the corridor became an open room, the shattered floor covered with individual flickering flames that glowed like dreams, surrounding a raised banner. It caught in a rising wind, tearing free, and for a moment it stretched out in full, a red and gold Dragon illuminated by the flames below, before lightning flashed once more, and in a great gust of wind that echoed a scream, the flames were extinguished. The banner floated gently down to rest on charred and fractured stone, and knowledge he could still not put into words hit Elan with the weight of a hundred souls.

That night, he did not dream the shattering, did not dream the darkness. It almost seemed a relief, until he looked out the next morning, at the instant the Sharom was broken and darkness filled the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> (comments are moderated for the simple reason that I haven't actually finished WoT yet. I'm getting there. Slowly).


End file.
